[runako]

Re #2: Sorry, I wan't directing that at you and meant no offense. Per your post:

>> I've been running my own for 13 years now (plain old postfix and dovecot on whatever linux distro I favor at the time).

For those of us without the experience of 13 years running postfix and dovecot (and spamassassin and writing perl filters), there will certainly be at least some time investment. That's what I was talking about: the price in hours to go from zero to competent. You may be too competent by now at email hosting to realize that it would not be a minutes per week affair for most people to do well.

Obviously if it works for you, great. Interesting to note that you started running your own long before GMail; the calculus of starting to self-host is different now.

Re #1, you should lend your spam filtering tools to Yahoo! In all seriousness, a handful of unwanted messages per day would be a dramatic improvement to my Yahoo! inbox. Whatever they are doing over there is not as good as what you're running.